Today I installed fedora 13, with 1 gB root partition (ext 4 i believe), a 500 mB boot partition (i forget which i used here) and a 1 gB swap. For some reason unbeknown to myself, my root partition claimed to only have (blank) amount of space. I thought this was normal, but as I continued to install programs, it would show a smaller amount in the aforementioned blank space. I eventually had to reinstall just because it couldn't run the avahi-daemon, and therefore wouldn't run gnome.... leaving me with a black screen after login. I had to back up my files via CLI and then be pissed off all day.

Can someone PLEASE, for the love of GOD, and all things holy, explain to me what happened here, and how to prevent it? It would be MUCH appreciated.

kthxbai!
Jaimeaux"

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I don't understand WHY though. I've always been told that you rarely need more than 5 gB for a root partition... I'm lacking the understanding here. When I ran Fedora 12 I had a 5 gB / partition, and it worked great.

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I don't understand WHY though. I've always been told that you rarely need more than 5 gB for a root partition... I'm lacking the understanding here. When I ran Fedora 12 I had a 5 gB / partition, and it worked great.

Sounds as if whoever told you this (that root only needs 5 GB) might have been using some mental shorthand. Unless you are making separate partitions for /lib, /var /home and so on, everything you install is making use of root.

When you install a package it makes use of /lib, /bin, /etc, (though that will be small, usually), /share/doc and often /var, all of which are under /. So that 5GB will get used up very quickly.

Whoever said use 5GB might have been thinking of setting up separate partitions for the others. (Or, it may have been an older book-- like Windows and Mac, Linux has become considerably larger and bloated over the years.)

You say it worked before--how long ago was this?

IMO is in my opinion. IMHO is in my humble opinion. I tend to write, IMNSHO, In my not so humble opinion.

I realize it's frustrating, especially when something written relatively recently is no longer relevant, but a gig hasn't been enough for awhile--even with a fairly complex partitioning scheme, such as putting the aforementioned /usr and /var (and often /home) in their own partitions, a gig would be pushing it.

Even with the smaller distributions, in most cases, a gig wouldn't be adequate, unless, as mentioned above, one uses a more complex partitioning scheme.